Bloom
The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel
1st Edition
Published on 23. October 2003
276 pages
978-0-19-803656-2 (ISBN)
Description
Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, and exploring the variations it spawned--natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience--this study offers a fresh, detailed reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides an entirely new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.
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Content
- Intro
- CONTENTS
- INTRODUCTION: The Girl and the Water Lily
- ONE: Linnaeus's Blooms: The Birth of the Botanical Vernacular
- The Rise of Botanical Culture
- The Mechanics of the Botanical Vernacular
- Botanical Mimetics and the Novel
- The Eighteenth Century: Occluded Blooms
- Toward the Nineteenth Century: The Bloom Narrative
- TWO: Imaginative Literature and the Politics of Botany
- Botany's Gendered Controversies
- Botanical Modesty: Edgeworth's Belinda
- Botanical Poetry: Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin
- THREE: Austen's Physicalized Mimesis: Garden, Landscape,Marriageable Girl
- Lovers Walk: Burney's Evelina and Austen's Pride and Prejudice
- Improving Grounds, Improving Complexions
- Bloom: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion
- FOUR: Eliot's Vernaculars: Natural Objects and Revisionary Blooms
- Ossification: Midcentury Bloom in Dickens
- Revivification: Midcentury Bloom in Middlemarch and Adam Bede
- Organic Realism: Eliot and Natural History
- FIVE: Inside and Outside the Plot: Rewriting the Bloom Script in James
- The Critic and Bloom
- The Girl as Topic: Watch and Ward and The Awkward Age
- A Blooming Consciousness: The Portrait of a Lady
- Bloom's Decadence: The Wings of the Dove and The Picture of Dorian Gray
- CODA: Later Bloomings: Molly's Bloom
- NOTES
- INDEX
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- Y
- Z
